Nightmare Night Chapter 38 draft complete · 3:12pm Jan 19th, 2023
It's now with prereaders with the working title of Agni Kai, for its Avatar - The Last Airbender-inspired firebending battle—though that's far from the only thing it references. It's currently coming in at just shy of 16k words, meaning it'll probably be over 17k by the time I'm through with editing passes and all the additional detail I usually add.
That's long enough where I have to consider breaking it up, but I'm still leaning against it because there's no natural breakpoint in the middle of it, and honestly I'd rather the duel between Eclipse (Twilight) and Solar Inferno (Sunset) be contained in a single chapter. It's a climactic battle even if it's just the undercard of the main event, and I allow longer chapters then.
A word of warning, though. This chapter has turned out a bit dark in places. But it matches my general temperament as I've been in a dark and unhappy mood of late—at this point, I think it's a due to a combination of low testosterone and my usual mid-winter blues—and it's appropriate to this point of the story anyway as two friends-turned-foes fight it out as alicorns, with neither giving an inch to the other. It also wouldn't be the first time the story took a dark turn, if you remember the final chapter of the Canterlot Command Center corruption, where Luna overcame it but also showed how near to being Nightmare Moon she remains.
Projected release date is either Sunday morning or evening at this point, depending on the pace of prereads and my own editing passes. And afterwards, fans of Feathered Hearts will be happy to know that I've decided to write a new Continuation and Chronicles chapter before heading back over to Midnight Rising. The reason is that although I get new testosterone pellets implanted today, it'll take a couple weeks for them to fully kick in. So if I'm going to write clop, I'd rather be at full charge to do it.
EDIT: Blog #600!
I'm looking forward to reading it.
On a completely different note but related to the story there are 6 ponies who haven't been mentioned and who I think should be mentioned with regards to their corruption. They're all popular adult background characters living in Ponyville according to TvTropes. They are: Berry Punch, Bulk Biceps, Doctor (W)Hooves, Golden Harvest/Carrot Top, Flitter and Cloudchaser. What you do with them is up to you but I would guess that Carrot Top becomes a Timberwolf because she's a farmer like the Apples and Doctor (W)Hooves would likely become a cyberpony because of his connection with Derpy.
Even if the chapter wasn't close to being finished I doubt it would have been the best place for any of them to show up since the focus is on Elcipse and Solar Inferno. If you continue with Temptations and Transformations they could proabably show up there.
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And I always look forward to your comments after doing so. Your latest did not disappoint.
It’s true, I’ve missed mentioning those to this point. I’ll have to see if I can find something to do with them later, either here or over in T&T if and when I ever get back to it. That remains firmly on the back burner for now, though.
My thoughts exactly. Will I continue it? The biggest thing that stops me from doing so is that I just don’t get a high level of feedback on that story--the reward has not generally been worth the effort there, at least not compared to my other works. But we’ll see what happens down the line.